In case you don’t know what’s going on, I’ve been talking a bunch about how MVOL has gone and what comes next! You can get more info on all that here! I held a big series of surveys after talking it over, then compiled all the results and talked about those, and now it’s finally time to take all of that and jump into action! July is a big month for me as a game designer! My Very Own Lith v1.00 is coming out tomorrow, and I’ll finally take that momentous step into being an adult game designer with a finished game in my portfolio, which is surely a small and prestigious group, from what I’ve seen. But that also means it’ll finally be time to get serious about my projects beyond MVOL, and that, in turn, means it’s time to start making a lot of changes!
I tackled the bulk of the big surveys I rolled out in the last few months covering MVOL and how I should build my future projects in the last post, and today it’s time to go over the results for the last survey, then talk about some of the write-in feedback I’ve gotten! I’ve learned a lot of important things from these surveys and I’m really happy with how they’ve turned out overall. It’s been a ton of work, but I do want to do more of these in the future to make sure I’m staying in touch with you guys! Let’s get started!
Alright! I rolled out a big series of surveys to cap off a big series of posts talking about how I think MVOL has gone and what I’m going to do from here, and I gave a healthy amount of time for everyone to give their opinions before I downloaded all the data and spent some time wrangling it up into a bunch of useful numbers and graphs. It’s taken a lot more time and work to get this all put together than I expected, but I’m definitely getting some helpful info! Today I’m gonna go over the results from the first three surveys and how I’m interpreting them, then talk about how it’ll influence my choices from here.
Over the past several months I’ve been writing a series of posts explaining my thoughts about how MVOL has turned out and all my hopes and plans for the future. Today I’m going to try and sum up the very heart of what I’ve been trying to say with all that, and then I’m going to link a survey I’d like as many of my fans to respond to as possible. If you haven’t read the posts before this, I absolutely encourage you to check it out from the start so you can get all the details, but for those that can’t put in that much time reading, hopefully the wrap-up here will give you the gist of it, along with a few extra notes.
To be honest, this section has been the most difficult for me out of this whole process. I’ve rewritten it in part or in whole something like six times now, partly because I’m uncomfortable with some of the things I have to say about myself, and partly because I only came to realize what I was really trying to say more recently. Making a career out of designing my own game has been amazing, and I deeply appreciate that you all have supported me to make this a reality. That said, it’s only now that things are finally changing up that I’ve come to realize just what an effect it’s had on me. I’ve grown comfortable with the cycle of producing endless content, primarily in text, for this one game– even though it’s been grating at me to be so focused on one thing to the point of repetition by this point.
At this point, I’ve gone over the big lessons I’ve learned from MVOL, both from my successes and my failures. I’m hoping this gives you a pretty strong sense of context and helps you understand the mindset behind the changes I want to make from here, but I haven’t actually been very specific about what changes I want to make in how I make games from here. For this post, I’d like to get into the details of what ways, specifically, I want to push myself to improve in making adult games, and what I want to experiment with in the “small prototype” plan I mentioned before. This should give you a better idea of what, specifically, is coming– or rather, what’s being added to what I already do, in one project or another. Take a look, and if you have feedback, I’m always happy to hear about it.
So I’ve discussed the things I think I did well with MVOL, most of which I’m hoping to carry forward into my future work as much as possible. But I also feel like working on MVOL has taught me a lot of important lessons about erotic games, and I really want to push in some new directions to “do a better job” in several metrics, including making the experience better for all of you guys, making this less stressful for me, making it more successful for me as a business, and getting more people to play my games. So let’s talk about flaws and mistakes, and how I want to do better next time.
I have a lot of criticisms for myself and a lot of things I want to improve on, but before I get into that I figure it’s a good idea to discuss what I feel I did well in making MVOL, both to give a more well-rounded view and so you guys don’t think I’m being too hard on myself later on. I’m certainly proud of what I’ve accomplished so far, even if there are many, many ways that I might wish I had done better. Inversely, please don’t take this post as me bragging about my accomplishments, and certainly if you think I haven’t done so well as I describe, you should let me know, as well as if there is anything you admire about MVOL that I don’t cover here. I’m also trying to get a strong idea of what made up MVOL’s “appeal,” so I don’t lose sight of that too much in my future works.
My Very Own Lith is finally nearing completion! While it still needs a good deal of content and several more endings added before it’s ready to move into beta, and I expect to still have a lot of work to do on the game after that before it’s a finished project I can be happy with, I do think now is a good time to start talking about the future beyond MVOL. This project has been a huge part of my life for a long time now, so it’s a little strange and intimidating to even think about what will happen when development is over, but it’s also pretty exciting.